Researchers Believe Newborns Pick Up Their Vocabulary From Their Fathers

Oct 31, 2018 by apost team

A new study from the University of Fudan in Shanghai has discovered that infants learn their vocabulary from their fathers. This could finally solve the "mother tongue" versus "father tongue" issue.

The study, led by Menghan Zhang at Fudan University's Laboratory of Contemporary Anthropology, discovered that an infant's vocabulary is actually picked up by the father, while the mother is responsible for the sounds they pick up, indicating that both have some influence on language acquisition.

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While there have been studies in the past that suggested that there were distinct differences between the sexes when it comes to language acquisition, there had been a debate as to whether or not one sex has greater influence on the language they pass on to their offspring.

Before Zhang's study, the most common idea was that mothers had the most influence on an infant's vocabulary, hence the "mother tongue hypothesis" ("mother tongue" itself refers to the first language we speak). However, we may now know that this hypothesis is incorrect.

There were other theories that countered this idea. One such theory was formulated by researchers at Geneva University in 1997 that proposed, that rather than inheriting their language from their mothers, infants picked up their language from their fathers, becoming known as the "father tongue hypothesis."

The study, which was led by Dr. Estella Poloni, looked at the correlations between language variations and the two parents' genetic lines. It established that linguistic variations correlated with the Y chromosome (which comes from the father) but not with mitochondrial DNA (which comes from the mother).

While the "father tongue hypothesis" was more accurate, mothers still have a major influence on the language that the infant acquires. Not only do most children spend more time with their mothers until they reach adolescence, but they actually begin to learn their "mother tongue" before they're born.

In fact, before birth, children can differentiate their mother tongue and other languages, and can recognize 800 words, meaning that babies with bilingual parents can recognize the sounds of two different languages.

It's not just language that mothers pass on to their infants. As a matter of fact, mothers also impart traditions, responsibilities, behaviors, meaning that they pass culture down to the infant as well.

Zhang's study sought to solve the issue of which parent is responsible for passing on language, so his team studied 34 Indo-European populations to explore the connections that vocabulary had with the Y chromosome and sounds had with mitochondrial DNA.

Unlike past studies, the team studied the two separately, but indeed found that we pick up our phonemic traits (pronunciations and sounds) from our mother's genes and our lexical (vocabulary) traits from our father's genes.

In doing this study, Zhang had managed to dispel both the "father tongue" and "mother tongue" hypotheses, and instead found a way to combine them to suggest that both parents play different but equally important roles in how we as infants pick up on different languages.

What do you think about this new discovery? Do you think you picked up your dad's vocabulary? Let us know your thoughts and don't forget to spread to spread the word about this study!